Question

While playing around with regexps in Scala I wrote something like this:

scala> val y = 'Foo' y: java.lang.String = Foo  scala> y 'Bar'  scala> 

As you can see, the second statement is just silently accepted. Is this legal a legal statement, and if so, what does it do? Or is it a bug in the parser and there should be an error message?

Answer 1

This is indeed an error in the parser. It is fixed in scala 2.7.2 (which is RC6 at the moment)

$ ./scala Welcome to Scala version 2.7.2.RC6 (Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM, Java 1.5.0_16). Type in expressions to have them evaluated. Type :help for more information. scala> def y = 'foo' y: java.lang.String  scala> y 'bar' <console>:1: error: ';' expected but string literal found.        y 'bar'          ^  scala> val x = 'foo' x: java.lang.String = foo  scala> x 'foo' <console>:1: error: ';' expected but string literal found.        x 'foo'          ^  scala> 'foo' 'bar' <console>:1: error: ';' expected but string literal found.        'foo' 'bar'              ^